Groupthink Quotes

The enemy of individuality is groupthink.

Socialists have infiltrated our schools, our law courts, our government, our MEDIA OF COMMUNICATIONS. ... the Socialist movement is made up of a relatively small number of people who have developed the TECHNIQUE OF INFLUENCING large masses of people to a VERY HIGH DEGREE

Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.

… when you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an Assembly can a perfect production be expected?

Considering mankind's indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its regime, the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told.

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

The truth is that most people lack the intellectual ability and courage to resist a popular movement, however pernicious and ill-considered.

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Nutty ideas persist longer than they used to because ideas can dwell in the safe space of like-minded groups on the internet.

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd.

One of the things you hear about when studying the nature of fanaticism is that a lot of the time, people don't start as fanatics. They shift and evolve into that state. That's a process, a systematic process of losing your identity and sense of self.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion - and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

There is nothing that makes more cowards and feeble men than public opinion.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.